OpenStack StartUp Ecosystem – It’s Real!

For the upcoming OpenStack conference in Paris, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the ecosystem has evolved since OpenStack started. Storm has been fortunate to be involved early and found some success with SwiftStack and MetaCloud – which was recently sold to Cisco (Blog post here). As most know, I think OpenStack is a big part of the future of infrastructure and have numerous blog posts on the subject. I have invested with some conviction for the past 3 years but I think we are still in the early days – the large companies have really just got on board in the last 12 months with the exception of maybe RedHat. The future is very bright for startups – and the $100 million financing for Mirantis or the new $16 million financing at SwiftStack are just two of the latest data points (which incidentally didn’t make it into the graphic before I took it to print). With some help at Storm (thanks Jordan), we looked companies which are either platinum, gold or corporate sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation. There were 63 that made the list as startups. There is a larger group of supporting companies that would have made the numbers even larger. You can view all the companies here.

Some other interesting statistics: OpenStack isn’t just for newly minted startups – Pactera (1995) and Parallels (1999) were both started long before OpenStack – or the concept of cloud infrastructure for that matter.

The newest company was Stackstorm (2014). I am about to invest in a new company as well – but this is really a moving target. Stackstorm is a great example of a new generation for sure.

More than 180 investors in total have made investments in OpenStack companies. All the data was collected via Crunchbase, OpenStack.org and company websites. Please let me know if you have any comments or thoughts on how to improve – we’ll try to put something together again next year. I think its a trend worth watching.